Inside Finland’s education system | The Listening Post

[Music] a grinning purple cat a bouncing yellow sun a classic combination for any animators out to attract the attention of small children but this video produced by finland's National Audio Visual Institute has an important message about the media these kids are consuming it's been designed to help pre-primary school children work out what's real and what's not and what can be done if they're left scared or confused by what they're seeing that's because in Finland no one is too young to start thinking about the reliability of the information they encounter the approach that we are promoting

is that that you have to start uh with very young children uh before the school age and and you start with basic elements of of media and understanding of what media is about and then you build the understanding that there's always someone behind each picture and each story and the the the older the children get the deeper you go into these different parts of media and and content creation and production media literacy is not one single subject it's taught across all subjects for example in Finish language and literature we teach the basic skills we talk

about fake news source analysis media criticism then in maths we might focus on statistics and algorithms in art classes students learn about images how photos are edited in history class we discussed an air raid that took place during the second world war and thought about how the same incident could be taught differently depending which side the country had fought on it's very important that we don't just teach the subject matter but also the analytical skills who produced it and for what purpose spotting fake news is a very real part of daily education here in filant

sometimes it's subtly woven into everyday subjects sometimes it's more specific we're about to sit in on a class where 14-year-olds are learning all about Miss dis and Mal information questioning and challenging claims like the moon is made of cheese Bri the students are very good at recognizing fake news for example when news about the war in Ukraine started appearing online fins in general have a very high standard of media literacy we're not easily fooled that's in part because media literacy Is Not A New Concept for Fins it's been part of the culture for more than

a century ever since the Nordic Nation first gained independence from Russia in 1917 almost 100 years on having walled itself off from years of Soviet propaganda the fight against fake news is still being fought first in the aftermath of Russia's 2014 annexation of Crimea and more recently with Putin's invasion of Ukraine in particular concerns about narratives challenging finland's ambition to join NATO and media literacy is now mandatory a core component of the national curriculum teaching Finnish students to form a front line of defense against any disinformation including content infiltrating the 830 M long border the

two countries still share During the period of finlandization in the Cold War The Finnish media were very cautious about their neighbor the Soviet Union people always had to ask themselves whether the news was really true of course there have been changes since Russia has taken on an increasing aggressive Global role we're also spending an increasingly significant part of our lives on social media so teaching media literacy and criticism in schools is so important we were one of the first countries in in EU uh probably in the world to actually have a specific policy for media

literacy there's no one single right way to promote media literacy there are multiple ways and and different organiz ations can do the work from their own viewpoints that way we feel that we can reach much more people than than we would be able to do if it was all done only by us uh a governmental office uh producing only only materials by the government and and telling like the official story there's no escaping the multifaceted media education effort underway so many different organizations are developing and deliv ing learning programs from schools universities and libraries to

government departments and Nos and one of the biggest players is the public broadcaster Wy Mary vumi is one of W's media producers she works on a number of the news networks teaching tools including a project called news class we have 14 different news mentors working from around Finland they go and meet the class they tell them who they are and then they go through like how news come about like what do you see on the TV how does that happen and once you go through the whole process they they actually start thinking about these publication

me methods and that is really the way fake news can be detected then of course does a lot of other other things we have Wy learning which does different types of video on media education like the light detector F the Deep fake videos we produced have been really popular and the reason why we put them out was that artificial intelligence is coming at a speed where we need to kind of let people know that it exists and how it works we also offer uh different types of games that you can immerse yourself into and and

think of uh what it would be like to be for instance a troll trolls foxes dogs there's a whole managerie of characters being deployed by game designers and developers to draw kids in it's the more entertaining side of the educational toolkit but that doesn't mean it's all just fun and games troll Factory is where you put yourself in the position of a troll and deliberately create as much harmful material as possible for online distribution it's quite an unpleasant game but students experience the harm of spreading misinformation which is perhaps a good thing for them while

newslab uh produced troll Factory uh when Russian trolls were really on the news here in in Finland it really makes you think like I do not want to be the Lord of of Lies which is the end result when you think of kids who are getting gers if for some reason we manag to incorporate one media education game into this set of of gaming it's only a bonus playing to student strengths the media literacy program is a point of Pride one of the many International indexes where this small Nordic Nation consistently comes out on top

having spent the last century schooling its citizens to fend off fake news Finland is Shifting its f Focus guarding against new trends Technologies and platforms to ensure that every pupil is prepared to fight false information whatever form it might take thanks for watching hit that like button leave us a comment to let us know what you think about anything that we covered this week and don't forget to follow us on Twitter does anyone really call it x Facebook and Instagram for updates from the show links are in the description